A moment of profound importance, or not

Malcolm Clark at Spiked is very amusing about luxury pronouns.

Remember when Doctor Who was fun? Watching it now is about as much fun as being publicly humiliated at work by some jumped-up nonbinary form-filler from HR who thinks he’s amazing because he’s painted one of his fingernails black.

A good example of this joylessness is a scene in the most recent special, ‘The Star Beast’, which has been treated by right-on broadsheet types as a moment of profound importance. Yet all that happened was a transwoman character – played by transwoman actor Yasmin Finney – lectured the Doctor about pronouns. In a moment of unforgivable Time Lord-cis privilege, the Doctor had assumed a diminutive alien called Beep the Meep used male pronouns. What was he thinking?

Not, we can be pretty confident, of the very longstanding convention of referring to all generalized people (lawyers, voters, workers, students etc) as “he” in the singular, as if males are normal and females are some eccentric aberration.

You can tell how out of touch Doctor Who has now become by the fact its enormously pompous showrunner, Russell T Davies, seemed to think that the new series would shock viewers with its ‘progressive’ radicalism. The only shock was the alien pronoun scene’s patent stupidity.

I mean, why on Earth would the Doctor assume the gender of any alien? He has been encountering aliens with no fixed gender since the 1960s. The Doctor has effectively been asking aliens for their pronouns for nigh on 60 years.

Davies may think he’s blazing a trail with the new series of Doctor Who. But the truth is that gender-bending in science fiction is as old as the frozen hills of Gallifrey. In The War of the Worlds, published 125 years ago, HG Wells regaled us with Martian invaders who reproduced asexually. And hermaphrodites pepper sci-fi, from the work of Philip K Dick to that of Ursula K Le Guin.

It’s a sign of the bubble Davies has blown around his throbbing ego that he thinks the notion of genderfluidity is a jaw-dropper. I hate to break it to Davies, but his central protagonist routinely breaks the laws of actual physics by time travelling. In comparison, breaking the laws of our Earth-based mammalian biology is no biggie.

I do like the image of a bubble blown around a throbbing ego.

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